hotsos 2011, the other days

Somehow my WordPress app on iPad got fu-barred on the plane back home, two large draft blogposts got lost. That’s the last time I trusted just an app with a lot of content! Because of this I will cut my post short: after the anger of losing the content I can only recapitulate some highlights.

Well, in short hotsos-tuesday was all about statistics. The sessions were in the wrong order for me though. For me personally it would have made much more sense to first let Doug Burns and Maria Colgan explain the theoretics and after that let Margaret Norman show a real world implementation. I still don’t get why Margaret wrote her own implementation of degree input parameter for dbms_stats, but that’s probably my ignorance. All three sessions were great and I can advise everyone to look for the presentations online.

Another highlight of Tuesday was Tim Gorman showing a perfect valid example of how you can use AWR and ASH for more than performance tuning. An entertaining presentation, exactly the right amount of content for an end-of-the-day presentation.

Hotsos wednesday was interesting. I went to see Karl Arao, Toon Koppelaars (tip: great presenter!), Mark Farnham, Tanel Põder and did something I promised I would not do again: I went to see Tom Kyte. Tom was enormous entertaining, a true keynote presenter: way to go mr. Kyte.

Next I had to sprint to a cab (which I shared with Alex G.) to take my flight to Detroit, a 50 minute transfer and then off to Amsterdam.

All in all I had a great conference. It’s been a while since I attended a conference with that much technical content. Hopefully I will attend again next year for the tenth anniversary.

Finally, to conclude this post: Disclosure; I’m attending this year’s Hotsos Symposium without the help of any other program. The time off work, travel & accommodation is at my own expense.

hotsos 2011- Day 1

Since I didn’t do anything worth mentioning on day -1 (all non-technical social things) except for one prediction made by a Scottish guy about my summary of hotsos after the conference: “not technical provicient”. We’ll see what happens 🙂

The conference is packed with heavyhitters from the Oracle field. Guys boasting about working with Oracle since version 2 or 3, that kind of stuff. Luckily most of them didn’t stop investigating Oracle, which gives good critial sounds and new insights (for me).

Anyway, the day started with a keynote by Kerry Osborne. Luckily this Texan bloke knows he’s Texas-centered, so his view to how Oracle got to the point of creating Exadata is just that: Texas centered (which doesn’t make it wrong). Content was exactly like you expect it for a keynote: light and highlighting the top subjects for the symposium. He did predict that disk companies will consolidate or be bought by Oracle (or IBM) in the future. Todays news just might show he’s right.

Next up Kerry went into dept about tuning Exadata. It’s kind of shocking to me how basic some of the questions about the Exadata setup were. I figured most people would have read up (or worked) on Exadata before going to Hotsos, but my assumption was wrong. Well…. we all know how assumptions can set you back. Sadly this turned the start of Kerrys presentation a Q&A about the Exadata basic architecture. Even more sad is that this cut Kerrys presentation short, leaving at least 15 slides not shown. The part that I did see was excellent. Go and grab the presentation from the net if you can.

After Kerry Cary Millsap got in front of the crowd. Cary is an excellent presenter that has a great talk called “thinking clearly about performance”. He wrote a whitepaper about this which I strongly support (and yes, I know I said stuff about method-R in the past). I did see this presentation before, stil sat it out. Just to make sure that there’s no new content in it.

When lunch was finished I had a tough decision to make: either go to Toon Koppelaars or go to Gerwin Hendriksen. Since both subjects are interesting, I decided that the amount of people present was the criteria to visit which one. It turned out to be Gerwin’s presentation: GAPP (General Approach Performance Profiling). Gerwin made an effort to write a whitepaper explaining what GAPP is all about. Obviously this is a far better source of information than my summary would be. You can find the whitepaper at his website.

When break was over I went to see Andrew Zitelli’s talk about 4 things every developer (and DBA) should know about Oracle. Though the title might sugest otherwise, this talk was very usefull and it highlighted more than just basics. I learned some more things about read-only transactions, log file syncs and dbms_lock. Good stuff.

Finally to finish the day presentation wise I chose to go to Andrey Nikolaev’s talk about Contemporary Latch Internals. This is a more advanced topic which I don’t think I will ever use in real life (which is slang for: I hardly understand what this was all about). The D-trace examples are great though and just might turn usefull.

I don’t know if it’s up to me to spread the presentations from hotsos, so if you are interested you have to go and find them yourself.

Finally, to conclude this post: Disclosure; I’m attending this year’s Hotsos Symposium without the help of any other program. The time off work, travel & accomodation is at my own expense.

hotsos 2011, day -2

After a long long jerney, I arrived in Denver for a 3-day conference called hotsos. Immediately landed into a drink with good friends and met some new oracle scientists. Tomorrow I have some time to prepare for the presentations. Looking at the presentation material it seems I have to shut up and listen to other people instead of blabbering on myself. Somehow it feels good to do some real database stuff instead of more middleware. Anyway, lots of posts to come this week (if I actually follow my plan to publish my notes). Keep tuned in.